


But No Tears for the Tick Tock Girl

by NancyBrown



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Community: halfamoon, Community: trope_bingo, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 08:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/684786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NancyBrown/pseuds/NancyBrown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. After the fall of the Cyberking, there were casualties.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But No Tears for the Tick Tock Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Written for halfamoon and for Trope Bingo prompt: Steampunk AU. Also, the timeline is a little wonky. It's an AU. Roll with it.

_Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock._

Outside the shed, Lisa could hear the clip-clop of horses, snatches of conversation, and from farther away, the shouts from shoppers haggling with merchants for end of the day bargains. But inside, the most prevalent sound was the ticking, steady and precise and maddening.

She could barely move, attached as she was with so many cords to the secondary clockwork. It kept her alive, these gears and ratchets. Poor Ianto had cut his hands open over and over whilst cutting and fitting them in the fashion Lisa's brain told her they must be, describing for him concepts she barely understood. There should be lightning coursing through her, run with lines and wires. The creatures who'd done this to her had run on electricity, but she had none now, only the backup, and the slow ticking of her clockwork heart.

Thinking about the metal monsters brought back sharp memories: her first day working for the mysterious organisation whose name she'd never been told, but the only decent institution that would hire her. She remembered the faces of friends, perhaps twenty in all, hired to investigate rumours of phantasmagoria and otherworldly visitors, and every one of them unsuited to work anywhere else. They'd taken a team to look into the wild tales spoken by a wide-eyed child claiming to have escaped from a terrible workhouse overseen by steel brutes. Lisa herself had thought the boy dim-witted and prone to exaggeration, but had led her own small team of five to the place the lad indicated.

Her memories crusted over at this point, pained and sorrow-filled, with a bright flicker here and there of true memory. They'd all been captured and sawn apart like screaming logs. Ianto had rescued her during the mad scramble caused by -- she swore she remembered wrong, but Ianto assured her it was so -- a giant monstrosity of a steel creature treading over London. The rest of her team had perished by the time he'd arrived.

Cardiff in February was bitterly cold, but far safer than London, where every eye of their old group was set on sweeping up and destroying the last of the Cybermen. Ianto easily feigned grief and distress at the loss of his lover. He secreted her back here to his home city, covered in a box in the back of a carriage he drove himself.

"We'll make you well again," he promised her every evening, as he lovingly wound the clock, and kissed her like a precious treasure.

Lisa wanted to be well for him. She wanted to be well for herself as well, wanted to walk through the streets with her head held proudly. She wanted to wear a fetching hat, not this helmet that hid her hair, wanted to wear long skirts, not this armour that plated her skin. She wanted to run, and to laugh under the rare Cardiff sun, and raise children with the man she loved.

She wanted to live, and the thing inside her wanted to destroy. Half-converted, she stood by as the rest of the Cybermen were destroyed by their King, and as the human part rejoiced, the metal beast screamed for its fellows. She dreamed of walking arm in arm with Ianto down a busy street with none to stare, an old dream, but she also dreamed of reaching around his neck, strapping him into this metal cradle, and reinventing him in her own shiny image. She woke up crying from those dreams, only to be soothed by his hands and his kisses.

"Everything will be all right," he always said, and she tried to believe him.

_Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock._ The gears clonked into place.

The clockwork girl knew time as a presence, and she knew her lover was late. The hours stretched by slowly, in boredom and pain: the last dose of opium he'd given her had worn off. She wanted to scratch away her implants, but her bonds ensured she couldn't reach. His tender cares extended to saving her from herself, and she cursed him even as she loved him.

Lisa knew fear here in the dim shed, the sputtering oil lamp her only companion. If Ianto did not return, her own hands were bound too far away to wind the clock. Her heart would tick more slowly, tick and breathe and tock and breathe and tick and breathe no more. The scrabbling in her brain, like rats in the walls, gave her images to disturb her imagination: Ianto in an embrace with another woman whose body was not constricted and distorted, abandoning Lisa to her fate. But these were shadows, caused by the presence within her that lurked like a toad inside a log. Perhaps the kinder act would be for him to forget her, to return just that much too late, and allow her heart to beat itself dry.

She had dreamed so much. Lisa studied maths and science, hoping to be a woman of great discoveries, but one look at her face and all the doors were closed save the one she walked through. Was she to lose her many years of schooling, of work, of hope, hidden inside a shed like a mad wife in the attic?

The shed door creaked open, and as always, Lisa gasped, fearing the worst. But Ianto's sweet voice said, "I'm back, love," and her heart, however mechanical, leapt within her.

"I love you," she said simply, "now wind me up."

"Of course." He hurried to the clock, donning his gloves and cranking the great spring. He'd come directly from the new place, she could see by the goggles he still wore.

She didn't have room for coyness, not strapped down like some rabid dog. "Did they accept you?"

His face twitched, and she couldn't read his eyes behind his goggles. "Yes. I finally proved I could be useful to him and the team." It was about time; Ianto had presented the mysterious leader of this ragtag band, not dissimilar to their own ghost-hunting organisation, with an actual damn flying lizard. And he still hadn't been impressed even as he'd permitted Ianto a trial period to start.

"That's wonderful news."

She smiled, and after a moment, Ianto smiled back, and launched into a tale of his new co-workers: the brilliant technician with the thick pince-nez spectacles, who wore a red waistcoat full of pockets to hold her many tools; the quick-witted woman who served under their leader and led the investigations of the strange materials they unearthed; and the sullen doctor in his battered black hat who scowled at Ianto but could bring a man back from the brink of death. Of their leader, Ianto said little as he finished cranking the spring.

"They may have a cure for you, and if they don't, they have contacts around the world. We can send letters and hear back within a few weeks. Someone will know," he said with conviction.

She waited for the promise, the one that always came, but he turned away, hiding his face. His clothes were rumpled, not the neat lines he tried to keep. His father had been a master tailor, he'd told her, but had lost the shop due to drink. It was why Ianto never drank, why he'd fled to London looking for a better life, not wanting the same drudgery his sister chose.

_Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock._

"Are you sure?" she asked him at last.

"Of course," he said, and he leaned in for a kiss. But he tasted of second-hand rum, and he smelled of a strange cologne, and the metallic voice inside Lisa's head whispered and whispered and whispered.

***  
The End  
***


End file.
